Mamasita Anna Romps Through Sedate Palo Alto
Reviews and Photos by Kim Singh//ArtsDiva

“Anna in the Tropics” is an unlikely candidate for good wholesome an-evening-at-the-theater, for the folks in the Peninsula. This is the kind of material dished out in the off-off Broadway shows or in the fringe theaters in the City up there, “with its hedonistic ways.” The play is by Nilo Cruz and the leading cast is Latino. However, the production company is none other than the renowned “TheaterWorks,” known for lily-white casting for white-as-snow audiences, savoring clean-as-the-driven-snow theatrical material. So when the intermission draws to a close and the curtain rises, what do we see but a brown-skinned woman with her legs up and tightly wrapped around the muscular torso of a hot-sweaty man. Is this Palo Alto?

             Leo Tolstoy                                                     Alla Tarasova as Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy raises a mirror to the steamy ways of married and unmarried folk in tobacco-vile Tampa Florida in 1929. Anna Karenina was about a woman way out there in Russia, who had a tryst with hubby and lover. It takes lectors who would read to cigar factory workers from works of literature to help hold the mirror up to their lives. That is the role that art plays in our lives. We see reflections of our lives in the film we watch, or the play we live through, or in the painting hanging on museum walls. That is the role of art that misguided policy-makers seek to overlook or mask, when they slash funding for the arts, labeling art as being elitist. The light that shines in a woman's eyes as she works her 12-hour shift in a hot and sweaty, poorly ventilated cigar sweat-shop, when she is guided as if blind, with her fingers lingering on the Braille words of Tolstoy. How could that be an elitist endeavor?

Neither can the moment be denied, when we make the white folk in Palo Alto aware of wonderful literature written by talented Latino writers such as Nilo Cruz, a Cuban émigré who found his literary world via Emily Dickinson. The milieu that Cruz creates has a ring of authenticity that the Cuban mosaic that Hemingway created lacked. But then it was a white man who told us about a forbidden land and we lapped it up as gospel truth.

                        Nilo Cruz

Tolstoy said this of Anna Karenina: the whole problem, was to make the woman pitiable but not contemptible, and that when this creature came into his mind as a type, all the masculine characters he had previously invented immediately grouped themselves around her. Nilo Cruz has made a similar effort with the women in his play. The women are strong. The men the dogs that men tend to be. It takes a lector to come in from the outside, to help inject luster in a sagging relationship, sow seeds of jealousy and dissention, rape and murder. Yes this is the steamy world we live in while choosing to ignore the myriad ways that life manifests itself in our existence. As much as we seek to downplay the passion we are sustained by, as we move from work to home life to entertainment we seek fleeting glimpses of aspects of our lives denied by Victorian morals preached and ingrained by a hypocritical prudish society.

Lector reading to cigar workers

There is some wonderful acting by Vilma Silva as Conchita and David DeSantos as the lector Juan Julian. They are both making their debut with TheaterWorks. We hope that TheaterWorks will continue this trend of bringing good works to audiences in the Peninsula casting as diverse a cast as “ Anna in the Tropics.”

The production was replete with good sets and excellent lighting. The production was not unnecessarily lengthy and the accents held up till the very end. The audiences that TheaterWorks plays to however remain primarily Anglo. This is sad, given that Palo Alto and Mountain View now have an increasing Asian American and Latino residential community. It boils down to marketing and connecting with your audiences. The high prices of tickets certainly do not help in drawing a diverse audience. And then it also helps to advertise in local ethnic publications, such as Nuevo Mundo and El Observador and AsianWeek . The second huge lapse was in the absence of youth. This given that Stanford is around the corner is unforgivable. The high-priced tickets and the lack of marketing on the campus are to blame here. Why do arts companies bemoan the absence of audiences when they refuse to invest in creating and sustaining audiences, by focusing on communities of color and in the huge youth market out there? Inventive marketing by other production companies have seen youth audiences demand additional shows and shows in more accessible venues such as on the Stanford and SJSU campuses, which have excellent theaters.

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